How Can We Build a World Post Capitalism?

In Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin 2025), Seven Beckert’s original approach to understanding capitalism helps us to see possibilities for challenging it in the present precarious time we are living in.


A woman holds a banner ‘Capitalism Is the Crisis’ during Climate Strike protest organized by Fridays for Future movement also known as Youth Strike for Climate in Krakow, Poland on September 24, 2021.
(Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Cynthia Kaufman
Oct 05, 2026

Common Dreams


The billionaires are putting our world at risk through support for unregulated AI, funding the fossil fuel industry, and undermining democracy. They are using their unprecedented levels of power to lead us toward multiple pathways of total human annihilation.

Now is a good time to reflect on ways to challenge capitalism, a driving force behind the madness we face. And yet, on one side we have many people who are hesitant to name capitalism as a force behind destruction we face. On the other side, many of those few who do name capitalism use outdated and unhelpful frameworks for understanding how to challenge capitalism.

Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin 2025) is a book worth reading if you are interested in building a world past capitalism. Beckert’s original approach to understanding capitalism helps us to see possibilities for challenging it in the present precarious time we are living in.

Its approach to understanding capitalism as a process pushed by capitalists, developing their power, and colonizing the matrix of our social world, explains capitalism in ways that point to more productive approaches to anti-capitalism.

Beckert’s book has received awards and is being read widely. Yet much of the attention has been negative. Writing in The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus faulted the book for having such a diffuse idea of capitalism that it becomes “an inescapable vibe—responsible for everything, everywhere, all at once.” In his review in The Nation Corey Robin criticized it for offering a fuzzy and imprecise understanding of capitalism, which then makes the book unhelpful for shaping our anti-capitalist thinking.

These criticisms miss the political power and potential of this unorthodox approach to understanding capitalism. Beckert’s book takes capitalism to its origins and puts it into a global framework. It focuses on the agency of capitalists as a group of people who over time bring capitalism as a global system into being. Beckert’s analysis helps us update our understanding of capitalism in ways that make pathways to challenging it clear and actionable. Many anti-capitalist thinkers are stuck in a stale 19th century understanding of what we are up against. Those approaches make our search for solutions narrow and not actionable in the present.

There are three dead ends to anti-capitalist thought that Becker’s approach avoids. One is that capitalism began in Britain with the industrial revolution. That idea encourages anti-capitalist thinkers to focus on class as something separate from race and patriarchy. A second is that the main victims of capitalism are the industrial working class, that idea leads us to focus on the industrial working class as the most important carriers of movements to challenge capitalism. The third mistaken approach is that the only way to get rid of capitalism is through overthrowing the system in a dramatic revolution. That leads anti-capitalist organizers to focus on getting others to see how bad capitalism is but does not encourage them to build power to challenge it in the present. Each of these tendencies has its own way of being unhelpful for building anti-capitalist politics. Beckert’s approach to capitalism helps us find pathways beyond all of them.

Rather than staring his analysis of capitalism at the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as most anti-capitalist thinkers do, Beckert’s story begins in 1150 in Aden, in what is now Yemen. He argues that at that time, largely in the Muslim world, there emerged a global trade in luxury goods. It impacted very few people’s lives, and there were no societies based on it. This was a period of the emergence of capitalists—a very small subset of the population who traded goods for the sole purpose of generating wealth.

Many societies have engaged in trade to obtain goods that they could not produce themselves. What distinguishes capitalists from other traders is that they engage in trade for profits alone. The goal of any given transaction is money itself rather than something that money could buy.

Capital itself is money, or resources, invested for the sole purpose of generating more money. Early capitalists originally worked within the political realities they found around them. Over time these merchants worked to create political systems that would enable them to generate more wealth. These early capitalists often engaged in work to get governments to create conditions that were favorable to them. Think of Columbus and his relationship with Queen Isabella.

When these disparate acts of capitalists began to be elevated to the society-wide phenomenon we now call capitalism, was when they were able to control a land base and extract wealth, not just from trading, but from producing as well. Over time these merchants came to control more land and resources. Forced labor in the form of slavery was central to the early days of capitalism. So was colonialism: the forcible taking of land on which to engage in profit-seeking actions.

As more and more resources are controlled by capitalist processes, and as capitalists became more politically powerful, a large part of human society came to be dominated by these logics. Eventually, resistance to slavery made that form of exploitation less desirable to the elites. Employers were able to hire people into wage labor as the enclosure of commons threw them off the land they had previously used to sustain themselves. Colonialism was beaten back by people fighting for control over the political systems that dominated the places they lived. In many places colonialism was replaced by neocolonialism, where local people controlled the political system but continued to run the economy in the interest of faraway elites.

Beckert’s analysis broadens our frame in ways that allow us to avoid the pitfalls of an anti-capitalism that focuses only on the class-based harms of capitalism. If you accept the older framework, which focuses on capitalism as mostly about the exploitation of the industrial working class in Europe, then its relationships to slavery and colonialism are hard to understand. Much anti-capitalist thinking sees capitalism as a step forward from slavery and colonialism, rather than as their cause.

With regard to patriarchy, much anti-capitalist thinking focuses on the experiences of wage laborers rather than on the impacts of capitalist processes on the broader matrix of society that it transforms and destroys. This can lead to an anti-capitalist politics that defines the victims of capitalism so narrowly that racism and patriarchy are outside the frame of analysis. That makes building broad coalitions for anti-capitalist politics harder to achieve.

Moving on to the second dead end of much anti-capitalist thinking, if you see capitalism as fundamentally about the exploitation of labor, then you will not see the wide variety of ways that capitalism destroys the social fabric in which it operates. By prioritizing production and distribution that are done in markets for profits, capitalist ways of operating marginalize and deny resources to the caregiving matrix of our lives.

Caregiving labor, which has been disproportionately done by women, becomes socially invisible and undervalued. It is especially not valued in the discipline of Economics, which is largely the study of the profit-making sector. That narrow focus ignores the wide variety of ways that many people’s lives are made miserable by not having access to the resources they need to live well. It also ignores the many non-capitalist aspects of our economies that continue to thrive, even as the capitalist sector has increasingly large impacts on our shared social world.

By focusing on the capitalist class, as a group of people who are ready to subordinate our world to profit seeking, and by showing that members of that class act in a variety of ways in relationship to government, and the rest of society, in order to make the world over to enable their profit seeking, Beckert opens up our perception to the wide range of ways that capitalism causes destruction. He therefore opens us to a wide range of ways to fight against it.

Beckert’s approach is aligned with the work of Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation, his pathbreaking book from 1944, Polanyi argued that, in previous times, markets were subordinated to other social logics, and so their negative impacts were limited. What distinguishes capitalism is that the logic of markets comes to dominate, and their centrality undermines other ways societies have been structured to ensure that people’s needs are met. Markets come to have lives of their own, and the needs of markets come to dominate over the needs of people or the rest of nature.

Beckert updates Polanyi’s analysis by adding more detail, and also by naming more clearly than Polanyi does the forms of agency behind these destructive practices. This approach allows us to understand capitalism less as a total system and more as a set of destructive practices driven by those addicted to the profit motive. This approach helps us imagine a variety of ways to challenge capitalism.

We need to break the spell of pro-capitalist thinkers’ claim that human economies are best served when markets are allowed to decide what is produced, how it is produced, and who gets the things produced. We need to figure out how best to ensure that we are making the things we need, in ways that are sustainable, and distributed in ways that ensure that everyone’s needs are met.

We need to fight against the powers of the owners of capital by breaking our dependencies on capitalism for our survival. Fighting against the exploitation we experience in wage labor is a part of that. But gathering social resources for the caregiving aspects of our lives, developing public goods, and preventing the environmental damage caused by corporations pursuing profit at any cost, are also crucial aspects of challenging capitalism.

Finally, Beckert’s approach allows us to avoid the third and most destructive element of standard anti-capitalist thinking: the belief that we need to wait for a revolution. If you think of capitalism as a focused system that came into being all at once with one major transformation, it is easy then to imagine the way to get rid of it is through overthrowing that system with one large blow. That way of thinking about how to get rid of capitalism doesn’t position us well to understand the work we need to be doing right now to build power to stop the forces of social destruction while building the better world we are looking for, now.

Rather than waiting for a revolution to overthrow capitalism, anti-capitalists need to build power to fight against the variety of ways that the capitalist class is destroying our world. One way to think of this is with the idea of revolutionary reforms, the steps we take to make our world better, as we fight against the forms of destruction caused by capitalism and against the power of the capitalist class to destroy our social fabric.

Both Beckert, and Polanyi before him, owe a great deal to the work of Karl Marx. Marx’s criticism of capitalism remains an invaluable starting point for anti-capitalist thinking. But Marx’s narrow focus on the exploitation of labor as the single most important form of destruction caused by capitalism has led generations of anti-capitalist activists to hope the industrial working class would lead us away from capitalism. Those hopes have been repeatedly disappointed.

Marx faulted colonialism and slavery for the ways they were part of the destruction caused by capitalism, but many of his followers see those processes as side issues to the problem of capitalism. And so many anti-capitalists insist on a class-first analysis, which undermines their ability to work well in broad coalitions.

On the question of revolution or reform, Marx actually said very little. And much of what he said was contradictory. In places, he argued that the path away from capitalism was through building political power via elections. At other times, he claimed that all of that was a distraction from a revolution that would overturn all social relations in a short dramatic period. Many followers of Marx assume, incorrectly, that he only supported the second strategy,

Much of the criticism of Beckert’s book from the left has rested on the ways his understanding deviates from a telling of the history that leads to the core set of beliefs that have kept anti-capitalist thinking from being politically productive. Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History doesn’t address these questions of political strategy. But its approach to understanding capitalism as a process pushed by capitalists, developing their power, and colonizing the matrix of our social world, explains capitalism in ways that point to more productive approaches to anti-capitalism. If we want to bring anti-capitalist analysis into the broad liberatory social movements that are animating our time, we need to base our anti-capitalism on an updated understanding of what we are up against. Beckert’s book offers a starting point for that understanding.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Cynthia Kaufman

Cynthia Kaufman is a writer and educator. She is the author of six books on social change: Solidarity Economics: Building Sustainable Social Relations (Routledge 2026),Consumerism, Sustainability, and Happiness: How to Build a World Where Everyone Has Enough (Routledge 2023), The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook (PM Press 2021), Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury 2020), Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books 2012), and Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change (2nd Edition PM Press 2016). Visit her website.
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The Empty Chair: Why Asia’s Youth Still Show Up – OpEd

October 3, 2026

By Dr. Fr. John Singarayar

Key Takeaways:

The essay traces India’s Cockroach Janta Party to a May 2026 chief-justice remark and NEET leak anger: spoon-and-plate sit-ins, empty chairs for students who died, and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s July resignation plus compensation and a pledge not to prosecute protesters.

It sets that beside other youth flashpoints—Myanmar since 2021, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh 2024, Nepal’s 2025 revolt, the southern Philippines, Indonesia’s meal-program cut—as separate stories sharing disappointment that effort does not beat proximity to power.

A second wager is World Youth Day in Seoul in August 2027 (“Take courage”), a minority Catholic event; the author says Delhi’s empty chair is a memorial and Seoul’s an invitation, and that showing up is not proof it will work.

(UCA News) –It started, more or less, with an insult. In May 2026, India’s chief justice made an offhand remark in open court about young people who can’t find work, likening them to cockroaches.

He later said he had meant something narrower — people entering professions with fake degrees — but the word was already loose in the world.

A 30-year-old postgraduate student in Boston felt something snap and posted a question online: what if all the cockroaches came together? Within days, there was a website, a mascot and a name that parodied the ruling party’s name.


The Cockroach Janta Party began as a joke and quickly became the most serious youth movement India has seen in years.

What kept it going was not the joke. It was an exam. The national medical entrance test, NEET, the exam that helps determine who becomes a doctor and who does not, had been dogged by allegations of leaks and other irregularities. Anger settled on one demand: Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan should resign.

At sit-ins in Delhi, protesters banged spoons against steel plates — an echo of the gesture Prime Minister Narendra Modi once asked citizens to make for frontline workers during the pandemic, now directed against him. Organizers also asked people to bring candles for students who had taken their own lives after failing exams they said were rigged.

That detail tends to stop people mid-scroll. Being angry about a leaked test is one thing. Grieving over one is another.

At Jantar Mantar, protesters began leaving a steel plate and an empty chair at the edge of the sit-in — places for students who would never take another exam.


The protests eventually achieved one of their central demands. Pradhan resigned in July, after weeks of demonstrations over the NEET controversy. The government also accepted other demands from the protesters, including compensation for families of students who had died and a pledge not to pursue legal action against protesters.

But the story did not end there.

None of this occurs in isolation. Across South and Southeast Asia, a string of Gen Z‑led uprisings has reshaped politics since 2021.

The story begins in Myanmar, where the military’s 2021 coup triggered mass protests, a brutal crackdown, and a grinding civil war. Five years on, youth‑led People’s Defence Forces fight alongside ethnic armed groups, while the junta relies on air raids, conscription and foreign support to regain ground.

In Cambodia, a government assault on civil and political rights has seen record arrests for speech and activism in 2025–26, even as garment workers — many of them young — strike over unpaid wages, union discrimination and a minimum wage that does not cover rising living costs.

In Sri Lanka, mass protests in 2022 against economic collapse and elite rule helped topple a president and, two years later, brought a leftist coalition to power — yet young people still face high unemployment and austerity.

In Bangladesh, a 2024 student movement ended Sheikh Hasina’s long rule and restored a mainstream opposition party, but the underlying grievances — jobs, corruption, authoritarian habits — remain.

In Nepal, the Sept. 2025 “Gen Z” revolt began over social media bans and swelled into anger at corruption, nepotism and blocked opportunities. It forced a prime minister’s resignation, led to an interim government and fresh elections, and produced a ten‑point agreement on free education and healthcare, employment guarantees and digital rights — though activists marking the one‑year anniversary say many promises are unfulfilled and youth unemployment hovers near 20%.


Old insurgencies in the southern Philippines keep reigniting despite treaties meant to end them.

Indonesia has quietly trimmed its free meal program, a cut that will land hardest on families with the least room to absorb it.

These are not the same stories wearing different costumes; they are separate ones that happen to share a mood. That is a smaller and more honest claim than the grand, sweeping narratives op‑eds often reach for.

The mood, if it must be named, is disappointment rather than rage. Rage tends to burn out; this has not.

A leaked exam does more than cheat students who studied honestly. It signals, in plain terms, that integrity was optional and they weren’t told.

That is a bitter lesson at 20, just when people are supposed to learn whether effort or proximity to power pays. Disappointment is what you feel when the chair you were promised is still empty, and no one will say when it will be filled.

And yet none of this reads as despair.

Despair does not organize. It does not turn a judge’s insult into a movement with spokespeople sitting across from government ministers. Nothing was resolved in those early meetings in Delhi, but people showed up. Those who have truly given up stay home. The ones still in the streets are betting that noise works, even when the evidence for that bet is thin.

Halfway across the region, a quieter gathering is making a stranger version of the same wager.

In August 2027, Seoul will host World Youth Day, the global Catholic gathering that has never before landed in a country where Christians are a minority.

Only about one in ten South Koreans is Catholic, and roughly half describe themselves as having no religion at all, which makes the choice of venue almost provocative on its own terms.

Preparations began in November 2024, when young Koreans received the event’s traveling cross and a Marian icon from Portuguese pilgrims inside St. Peter’s Basilica, on the feast celebrating Christ the King.

The theme, borrowed from the Gospel of John, is short and pointed: “Take courage; I have overcome the world.” It reads less like a slogan and more like something said to someone who is, in fact, currently losing.

In Seoul, the cross will move through a city where most people have no religion; the pews will be full for a week, then empty again. The wager is the same: set a place, show up, and hope someone sits. But there is a difference. In Delhi, the empty chair is a memorial to futures stolen by leaks and lies. In Seoul, the empty chair is an invitation: a minority church, born in secrecy and martyrdom, is betting that a week of song, prayer and shared meals can make a dent in a secular, hyper‑competitive society where young people are among the most stressed and least hopeful on earth.


I don’t imagine the protesters in Delhi and the pilgrims in Seoul would recognize themselves in one another. Most have never heard of one another and never will. But both are staking something on the same unfashionable idea: showing up still matters even without much proof that it does. That is a strange kind of courage — no guarantees attached, no way of knowing whether it will be worth it. In both cities, someone is arranging chairs: one row for the dead, one row for the living.

Governments may respond to this particular wave, or they may not. Trust, once spent, does not refill itself through silence. And I do not think anyone involved — protester, pilgrim, or minister — actually knows which way this one goes.

Neither do I.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.


About Dr. Fr. John Singarayar
Dr. Fr. John Singarayar, SVD, is a member of the Society of the Divine Word, India Mumbai Province, and holds a doctorate in Anthropology. He is the author of seven books and a regular contributor to academic conferences and scholarly publications in the fields of sociology, anthropology, tribal studies, spirituality, and mission studies. He currently serves at the Community and Human Resources Development Centre in Tala, Maharashtra.
View all posts by Dr. Fr. John Singarayar →

Amazon Is Deploying AI to Spy on Its Workers and Bust Unions Before They Form

Internal company documents obtained by a Canadian labor board show how Amazon is tracking workers’ every move.

By Jonathan Rosenblum ,

Truthout

September 30, 2026

A worker walks inside Amazon's LCY3 Fulfillment Centre in Dartford, 

east of London, U.K., on June 4, 2026.

JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP via Getty Images

The 18th-century notion of the panopticon — a circular prison design with a guard station in the middle, allowing a single officer to enforce discipline by keeping watch over all the prisoners — has become real in the 21st century through AI-driven surveillance against workers: It’s the Amazon warehouse.

It should be no surprise that the company that harnessed technology to create a vast, $2.7 trillion empire would employ the same sophistication to enforce workplace discipline and tamp down insurgent unionization efforts. A recent disclosure of Amazon’s internal “employee relations” documents reveals just how extreme Amazon’s methods of warehouse surveillance and control have become.

Amazon employs what it calls the “Atlas” model, inputting into a computerized model a staggering amount of information on workers, their thoughts and behaviors, the workplace environment, and myriad other factors — “hundreds of data points,” according to the company. Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing. It’s like the “precrime” police in the film Minority Report who use psychic powers to identify and apprehend would-be criminals before they act — except in this case, it’s an AI-driven tool used by the billionaire owners of one of the richest companies in history to head off rebellion among its low-wage workforce. And this is not Tom Cruise play-acting; it’s very real.

Workers anywhere who have endured anti-union campaigns can relate to stories of overbearing surveillance by management; the Atlas model, however, takes the spying to an entirely new level.

Details of the Atlas model came to light recently as a result of a legal dispute between Amazon and Unifor, the Canadian private sector union. Last year, British Columbia’s Labour Relations Board awarded union certification to Unifor at Amazon’s YVR2 warehouse outside Vancouver, finding that the company had broadly interfered in the union drive. It was the second union certification at Amazon in North America — the other being the 2022 union win at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York. But in contrast to the U.S., where Amazon has managed to stall bargaining for four and a half years because of weak labor laws, the B.C. Labour Relations Board ordered Amazon to recognize the union and negotiate. Contract bargaining commenced last December.


Amazon Is Using AI to Disempower Workers. The US Labor Movement Must Fight Back.
Amazon is using AI in terrifying ways to disempower workers. We must fight back.
By Jonathan Rosenblum , Truthout June 6, 2026

Not surprisingly, Amazon has dragged its feet in negotiations, prompting the union to file unfair labor practice charges with the Labour Board. Following a series of hearings earlier this year, the Labour Board found that Amazon violated provincial law. In August it ordered a remarkable step — first-contract arbitration at YVR2. That fight remains in play, but as a result of the legal proceedings, Amazon was required to turn over documents to the Labour Board and Unifor. Unifor has shared them with Truthout, and they can be viewed here.

Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing.

In addition to the Atlas model revelation (beginning on Page 19 of the document), the material includes more than 100 pages that reveal in great detail how Amazon trains its frontline managers in union-busting. My colleague at the Center for Work and Democracy, Ben Fong, has written about this other portion of the disclosed material.

“Amazon’s own documents pull back the curtain on what workers have been telling us for years,” said Justin Gniposky, Unifor’s organizing director. “Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”

Amazon did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment on the Atlas model.

The documents describe the Atlas model as “a labor risk framework to clarify how Amazon evaluates emerging workforce issues, labor union targets, and internal or external labor threats.” The Atlas model ingests hundreds of data points: employee trainings completed; health and safety incidents, from simple first-aid cases to serious injuries; feedback from workers on management; worker tenure and turnover; the proximity of a warehouse to another workplace experiencing union activity; local minimum wage rates and other area economic conditions; and even the temperatures inside and outside of the warehouse.

Amazon seems especially thorough about scraping data from worker communications channels to plug into the Atlas model — the company’s internal “Voice of the Associate” (VOA) electronic bulletin board, the answers to digital questions posed daily to workers, and externally, forums including Reddit — “to understand the tenor of the discussion at the site level,” according to the documents.


“Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”

Atlas uses AI to identify phrases and “common keywords” to allow managers to do a “deep dive into the worker population driving the discussion.” Atlas also looks at the upvotes or other responses — positive, negative, or neutral — that the comments elicit, and the volume of those worker reactions. All of these data points go into Atlas and let managers “look around corners to identify developing themes” so they can “tailor strategic responses for addressing emerging risk.”

Amazon also tracks and documents all organizing activities that managers detect, and records them under the category of “employee relations events.” Each activity is assigned a severity score. “High severity” events include employees signing union cards, delegations of workers approaching management with demands, protests, sickouts, and work stoppages.

Atlas uses mathematical modeling to create a point system for all these data points, assigning a “labor score” to each workplace. The scale is further broken down into tiers, with the Tier 5 designation applied to facilities with high scores, where there is “no immediate perceived risk,” and Tier 1 applied to facilities where “future activity is imminent.” Amazon’s union busters focus largely on Tier 1 and 2 facilities.

Atlas produces extensive spreadsheets ranking different facilities and looking not just at raw “labor scores” but also at monthly trends. In 2024, the year the documents date from, Amazon was most concerned about union activity at 16 warehouses it had ranked as Tier 1. For instance, at LDJ5, a Staten Island sortation center across the street from JFK8, Atlas noted that leading issues of worker concern were “bathroom breaks, equipment, rest breaks, leadership/management, temperature.” The spreadsheet noted that “internal activists” — workers — were organizing, and that by looking at month-over-month trends, LDJ5 was experiencing “Risk Increase,” with the phrase placed inside a bright red box. At four of these Tier 1 facilities, the spreadsheet noted, the threat of union activity was sufficiently high to justify deploying Amazon’s “rapid response” team: union busters who travel to hotspots of organizing throughout Amazon’s global network.


Union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.

But the main value of Atlas seems to be predictive. For the Tier 2 worksites (“future activity is highly probable”), the spreadsheet poses these questions: “Which sites are showing the most future risk that are not Tier 1 sites yet?” and “What is the risk in each business line and which has the most risk, is it increasing or decreasing? What is driving the risk?” Tier 2 spreadsheets in the document look at the number of investigations of workers that management has handled in the last month, whether that number is trending up or down, the number of worker appeals of those investigations, and — notably — the percentage of negative worker comments on internal bulletin boards.

Voice of the Associate and other internal bulletin boards are key focal points. Charts in the document track how often workers raise particular topics, like weather, time off, breakroom amenities, management treatment, and restroom cleanliness. They also analyze the “vector” of each issue: “What are the top drivers of negative Sentiment and change MoM [month over month]?” is one question posed in the document. “What Sites are spiking MoM in negative sentiment? What themes are driving the sentiment? What anecdotes can we pull?”

Atlas is not strictly a North American tool. One chart analyzes trends for warehouses globally, documenting “employee relations events” — worker organizing — and cataloguing the number of worker comments on Voice of the Associate and the percentage of those comments that were negative. Two warehouses in the English Midlands where workers have been organizing with the GMB union — both Tier 1 sites in Atlas’ taxonomy — showed high volumes of negative VOA posts. A warehouse in Melbourne, Australia, also showed mostly negative Voice of the Associate posts, while posts were mostly not negative in some of the warehouses in Poland, Germany, and Italy.

All this is surely a tiny sliver of Atlas’s output. The former head of Amazon’s HR platforms, Bud Cashatt, boasted on LinkedIn recently about how his department created “predictive site-risk ML touching every building in Amazon’s global network.” (“ML” stands for machine learning, where programmers train AI to learn patterns and build predictions based on analyzing vast quantities of data.)

Did Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century British philosopher who dreamed up the panopticon, anticipate Atlas? Nearly 250 years ago, he imagined his panopticon as a useful tool for prisons, “madhouses,” and also “to the business of manufactories,” the industrialized manufacturing plants then just emerging in England. Speaking of his watchman in the center of the operation — the human Atlas of his time — Bentham wrote, “The concealment of his person will be of use.”

The documents uncovered at the B.C. Labour Board shine a light on Amazon’s concealed watchman. Atlas illustrates just how far Amazon will go to try to rule the warehouse floor. And its scope also underscores just how terrified Amazon’s masters are of their own workforce rising up and claiming their due.

Bentham theorized that the panopticon would facilitate social control: He imagined that incarcerated people would behave, not knowing at any moment whether they were being watched by the guard. It was, he wrote, “A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”

But what happens when prisoners — or workers — resist such attempts at social control? There’s no level of AI sophistication that can erase the reality that Amazon’s workers move millions of packages every day, and without their labor, the Amazon supply chain collapses.

Peter B. Olney, the retired organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, calls Atlas “a promethean tool for union busting and the thwarting of any employee organizing.”

To fight back against this “existential threat” to basic worker rights and unions, Olney says, “we have to get real about deploying massive resources towards organizing the workforce and finding their serious vulnerabilities and choke points.”

Today we see emerging fights everywhere against a billionaire class intent on harnessing AI and technology to undermine basic democracy and impose authoritarianism, both in the workplace and throughout society: in revolts against the algorithmically driven content we are force-fed on the internet; protests against and sabotage of the Flock cameras on neighborhood lampposts; and resistance against the replacement of workers with bots and computers. The Atlas model places Amazon workers at the center of this global fight against the AI billionaires. And it highlights that union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Jonathan Rosenblum

Jonathan Rosenblum is a union organizer, member of the National Writers Union, and part-time Amazon delivery driver. He serves as Activist in Residence at the Center for Work and Democracy, Arizona State University.

Trump’s Dismantling of Student Loan Aid Is Crashing Down on Debtors This Week

Organizers are calling to stop the collections, the wage garnishments, and the credit score reductions.

By Kristin Collier ,

Truthout

September 28, 2026

Veteran and student loan borrower Bonni Snider holds up a "I Am Not Profit" sign prior to a special forum on the rising cost of education at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on May 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Jemal Countess / Getty Images for Student Borrower Protection Center


Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.

“It is so much money,” Jacqueline Wheelock said to me about the monthly payment amount she will soon be forced to pay for her student loans.

Until last summer, she wasn’t thinking about this bill. Under the repayment plan known as SAVE (short for Saving on a Valuable Education), she could afford her payments, so she made them, month after month, never missing one or paying late. At the lowest, Wheelock paid $35 each month, and at the highest, she paid $110.

But now, in the wake of the Trump administration’s termination of SAVE, like 7 million other Americans, Wheelock must find a new plan — and soon — that works for her.

The problem is, she can’t find one that is remotely affordable. The cheapest plan available will cost her $285 but extend her repayment — and the total amount she pays — significantly. And the income-driven options that would qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, a program meant to relieve debtors after 10 years of qualifying payments and work in a public service job, would cost her between $693 and $733.

“Where the fuck is that money coming from?” she asked me. “I can’t work any harder. There’s nothing else I can cut out. My basic needs have to be met.”


Here’s How You Can Challenge Wage Garnishment for Defaulted Student Loans
The Trump administration announced that it will start forcibly collecting money from student loan debtors. By Braxton Brewington , Truthout January 10, 2026


Trump’s Dismantling of SAVE Plan Hits First Wave of Borrowers This Wee


Wheelock, who was contacted by her servicer on July 8, was among the first wave of debtors to receive notice that it’s time to make the switch. That notice was the start of a clock. Once sent, borrowers have 90 days to make the decision or the decision will be made for them: They’ll be automatically enrolled in the Standard Repayment Plan which is among the most expensive options. For the debtors alerted on July 1, their deadline is September 29.


“I can’t work any harder. There’s nothing else I can cut out. My basic needs have to be met.”

SAVE’s termination followed two years of legal challenges, spearheaded by GOP-led states that claimed, essentially, that then-President Joe Biden didn’t have the authority to make this plan and that the plan itself was too generous, designed to achieve mass cancellation after his first effort was blocked by courts. Though another lawsuit could shift the loan options again, possibly reinstating an older repayment plan (REPAYE) that’s been phased out (illegally, the plaintiffs say), it’s unclear when the judge will rule.

When a student loan payment makes it impossible for debtors to meet their basic needs, they have two options: don’t pay the loan or don’t meet your needs. Right now, there is evidence of both, each of which comes with devastating consequences.

In a recent survey of 7,500 people conducted by Protect Borrowers and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — which included AFT members, educators, health care workers, and public employees — 74 percent of respondents said they were living paycheck to paycheck. Over half of them said they were “losing sleep” because of their debt, and 32 percent of them reported that they avoided medical treatments when faced with financial stress. “Falling behind or going into collections on student loans are significantly associated with forgoing mental healthcare and counselling, seeing a doctor or specialist, follow‐up care, prescriptions and dental care,” summarized researchers in a 2019 study of the relationship between student debt delinquency and health care.

Meanwhile, over 9 million debtors are in default on their loans, a status reached after not making payments for 270 days. Another 1.5 million are in the late stages of delinquency and may enter default in the coming months. Defaulted loans can lead to a lowered credit score, wage garnishment, or the loss of Social Security income.

This cascade of harmful outcomes robs debtors of money they already didn’t have, leading to new levels of insecurity and new consequences — an endless punitive loop.


The Student Loan System Has Sunk Into Dysfunction Under Trump



It’s not just that debtors cannot afford the new plans they are being forced to choose from, it’s that the entire loan apparatus that would allow them to make this painful choice has broken down and is, at the moment, beyond repair.

Since SAVE’s termination and the introduction of a new Trump-era repayment plan called RAP (Repayment Assistance Plan), debtors have received confusing and sometimes contradictory information about when they need to switch plans, which plans they should switch into, and how much those plans will cost them. Additionally, sometimes Federal Student Aid has the wrong information on how many qualifying payments they’ve made for their income-driven repayment plan or toward PSLF. And in some cases, debtors’ payment counts have actually dropped without notice or explanation.

This summer, some debtors were mistakenly quoted $50 monthly payments — a number that drove them to make decisions about their plans — before being told it was another error and that what they actually owed would be hundreds of dollars higher. Others were told they were in default, and that default was reported to credit agencies, but, in fact, they were not. Debtors told me this error not only harmed their credit, but also made them feel terrified and ashamed.

When people want clarity, want a human voice to guide them through all the errors and impossible choices, they struggle to reach someone. Debtors report waiting hours on the phone only to sometimes get the wrong information, or be told that the representative doesn’t have the answer, before they are passed elsewhere.


Debtors Are Mobilizing to Demand Change



The student loan landscape is on fire, and everyone, whether they have loans or not, should be rushing to put it out.

A coalition of 89 organizations representing “millions of students, borrowers, workers, veterans, people of color, people with disabilities, and consumers” are calling for an “emergency hearing” so that legislators can look into the widespread dysfunction and hold the administration accountable.

This should happen, but it’s not enough.

The coalition writes that they are “sounding the alarm” on the state of student loans, which makes me wonder: Why wouldn’t our elected leaders have heard it yet? It’s so loud, so persistent, so wild and grating, that it’s all some of us hear.


If elected leaders don’t understand the scale and the depth of debtors’ suffering, it means they are not doing their jobs. And if they don’t care, they shouldn’t have them.

“I’m having trouble thinking of our future together,” Wheelock told me when we spoke in late summer. She’d recently gotten engaged, and rather than celebrating that commitment, she worried that their marriage will mean her loan payments spike even higher.

For debtors in the trenches of repayment, struggling to feed themselves, struggling to find or sustain their housing, to pay for treatments, to care for their family, all they can hear is the alarm. It’s everywhere.

If elected leaders don’t understand the scale and the depth of debtors’ suffering, it means they are not doing their jobs. And if they don’t care, they shouldn’t have them.

Last week, state student loan ombudsmen representing over 100,000 borrowers wrote to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and key legislators to request that the department “take immediate corrective action, including delaying mandatory repayment plan transitions until these operational failures are fully resolved.”

In other words, halt everything until they have a system that works.

Debt Collective organizers and allies gather in lower Manhattan on July 14, 2026, for a Debtors’ Assembly and to hear from local representatives and organizations supporting student debtors.Debt Collective

This letter was preceded by a call for a payment pause by an emerging flank of the student debt coalition, which includes member organizations such as the Debt Collective, Student Debt Crisis Center, and Democratic Socialists of America. These organizations have continued to organize their members on the ground, empowering them to contact their representatives, tell their stories, and escalate their shared demand.

The demands of this group are necessary and clear. They meet the scale of the moment. Stop the collections, the wage garnishments, the credit score reductions. Stop the payments. Send in the firefighters, put out the fire.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Kristin Collier

Kristin Collier is the author of What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System. Her writing has been published in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, Truthout, and Longreads. She is a visiting professor in Metro State’s Higher Education in Prison Program (TREC).

WSJ editors bury Hegseth for bizarrely offensive 'weirdo' speech: 'Has he met anyone?'

Matthew Chapman
October 1, 2026 

RAW STORY


Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Department of Defense's FY27 budget request on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz


The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board had scorn for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's bizarre speech boasting about how his military only had "warriors," rather than "beardos," "weirdos," or slurs for transgender people.

Hegseth, wrote the board, "rolled out several good U.S. military initiatives on Wednesday, and usually the purpose of big speeches is to persuade the public of worthy ideas. Yet Mr. Hegseth seems determined to shrink his support with gratuitous potshots, and that bears on whether the Administration can boost recruitment or confront new technology in warfare."

Many of the things Hegseth talked about are decent, the board wrote, like a program for recruiting officers out of schools — even if the focus is intensely on right-wing schools like Liberty University and Hillsdale College — as well as plans to establish a four-star command for autonomous weaponry.

However, the board said, Hegseth "couldn’t resist his usual polarizing attack routine against all and sundry, and he even accused the press of 'treason' for publishing what’s leaking out of the secretary’s shop. The most remembered line of the speech will be Mr. Hegseth’s declaration that the U.S. military no longer abides 'beardos' or 'weirdos.' As a practical matter, has he met anyone in defense technology lately?"

The fact is, said the board, "voters wanted the Trump Administration to restore and protect the military’s meritocracy, after race and identity excesses in the Biden Administration," something Hegseth promises to do, but now "his shoot-first firings of general officers have exasperated even some Republican Members of Congress, and the public is losing confidence in the project as it descends into debates about testosterone levels."

Ultimately, the board concluded, "Mr. Hegseth relishes attacking opponents, and even sometimes allies, as if he’s running a political campaign. But he’s a cabinet officer who needs allies to achieve his military goals."

Hegseth mocked for 'not achieving full extension' after speech about troop fitness

Erik De La Garza
September 30, 2026 

RAW STORY

Kasie Hunt and retired Army Lt. Gen. Karen Gibson on "The Arena." (Screengrab via CNN)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fixation on military fitness became a punchline when a retired lieutenant general was asked to evaluate his own workout form.

CNN’s Kasie Hunt noted Wednesday that Hegseth has repeatedly stressed physical fitness standards and cited an assessment in The Atlantic that described his push-ups as more like “half-ups.”

Hunt then played several clips of Hegseth working out on camera and asked retired Army Lt. Gen. Karen Gibson whether he was performing the exercises correctly.

“The kettlebell, not so much,” Hunt joked as laughter broke out on the CNN set of her show, “The Arena.”

“The pull-up is like this, not like this. Yes? No?” Hunt asked while mimicking the movement.


Gibson agreed that Hegseth’s form appeared incomplete.


“Well, he’s not achieving full extension of his arms or the joint there,” she said.

But Gibson quickly shifted to a broader point about Hegseth’s emphasis on physical fitness.

“I think every soldier should be fit. That’s really important,” she said. “But his fixation on some specific exercises is not the quality that makes the U.S. military so incredibly lethal and powerful.”


“There are lots of other things that make a good soldier,” Gibson added.

Alarm as Hegseth gives mega MAGA donors a say in future of warfare: 'Feels different now'

Robert Davis
October 1, 2026 
RAW STORY


FILE PHOTO: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shakes hands with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff US Air Force General Dan Caine as he returns to his seat after his remarks at a ceremony in remembrance of US military prisoners of war and those missing in action (POW/MIA) at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., US, September 18, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth alarmed some analysts Thursday after he announced he was inviting a few private citizens to collaborate with the Defense Department on the future of warfare.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Palmer Luckey, founder of drone company Anduril, have been given advisory roles in a Pentagon project about the future of war, The Guardian reported. The project, known as “Project Meridian," seeks to develop new weapons of war for different terrain ranging from outer space to subterranean.

The inclusion of private citizens in defense contracting is nothing new, but Brendan Glavin at Open Secrets noted in the report that the motley crew Hegseth has gathered raises some important questions.

“Bringing major industry players into these types of positions at the Pentagon is not something new, but what feels different now is the substantial financial support these two have, and continue to, deliver for the Republican Party,” Glavin told The Guardian.

Musk was one of the largest donors to President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, spending an estimated $250 million to help elect the president. Musk's companies have also been deeply wedded to some of the Trump administration's pet projects, such as the Department of Government Efficiency and the so-called "golden dome" missile defense project.

Luckey's company is also supported by the venture capital firm run by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to the report.

Luckey has also been dubbed the "godfather of Republican fundraising on the West Coast," according to the report.

"Invitations to political fundraisers obtained by the Guardian show Luckey hosted and co-hosted events for candidates from Trump himself to Ken Calvert, Rick Scott, Mehmet Oz, Ted Cruz and others. The most recent event was on 22 August, where he and his wife co-hosted a $50,000-a-head effort to 'Keep the Senate,' and listing guests John Thune of South Dakota, Mike Rogers of Michigan, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Jon Husted of Ohio," the report reads in part.

‘Best Minds’? Hegseth Taps Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich to Lead ‘Future of Warfare’ Project

“A board loaded with defense contractors and one draft-dodging war hawk will decide the future of the US military,” said one observer. “What could possibly go wrong?”

Palmer Luckey (left), Newt Gingrich (center), and Elon Musk (right) look on during US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” speech—in which the trio was announced as leaders of the “future of warfare” initiative—at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia on September 30, 2026.
(Photo by Sean Parnell/X)

Brett Wilkins
Sep 30, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that three men—none of whom have served in the military and two who make billions of dollars from it—will help lead a new Pentagon project on the “future of warfare,” even as he moves to eliminate hundreds of senior armed service leadership position, including many generals and admirals.

Hegseth unveiled Project Meridian during his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. The 120-day initiative will examine emerging technologies that the Department of Defense believes will be critical in future warfare.

“America’s best minds” will be brought together to “reimagine what warfare will look like in the future,” Hegseth said.

To that end, the defense secretary said that “Project Meridian will be co-led by three of our nation’s best minds, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.”




Musk, the world’s wealthiest human, is already deeply involved in US national security infrastructure through SpaceX—the recipient of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts—and other businesses. He was previously part of the administration as the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Luckey, who like Musk is a major Trump donor, is the co-founder of defense technology company Anduril Industries. Last year, he said that Anduril planned to produce “large numbers” of cruise missiles, fighter jets, and other artificial intelligence-powered weapons systems.

“If we have to fight Iran, and China, and Russia all at the same time, we are screwed,” Luckey said in pushing for more arms production.

Gingrich is a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives who had been pushing for war with Iran since at least 2005. Like President Donald Trump, he has been accused of dodging the draft during the Vietnam War by receiving numerous deferments; in Trump’s case for bone spurs, and for Gingrich because he was a student and a father.

“Those three great Americans are going to be joined by a team of senior leaders, hand-picked private sector leaders, and subject matter experts from across our nation’s unmatched innovation, academic, and policy ecosystems,” said Hegseth—whose Senate confirmation last year was so contentious due to concerns about him being unfit for office that it required a tie-breaking vote by Vice President JD Vance.

The defense secretary also announced the creation of an Autonomous Warfare Command—or Autowarcom—“a new four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force.”

The appointments come as Hegseth simultaneously pursues a major reduction in the military’s senior leadership. He announced Wednesday that the Pentagon would eliminate 20% of its roughly 800 general and admiral positions by January—doubling a previously announced 10% reduction. Hegseth described the cuts as necessary to eliminate “redundant force structure” and “unnecessary bureaucratic layers.”

The reductions follow the removal or early departure of more than two dozen senior military and civilian defense officials since Hegseth became defense secretary.

The contrast has drawn criticism from lawmakers and military observers, who expressed alarm at the prospect of removing experienced officers while handing an influential role in planning future war to warfare technology executives and a hawkish former lawmaker who is no longer accountable to the public.

“Interesting. A board loaded with defense contractors and one draft-dodging war hawk will decide the future of the US military,” NewBlue USA executive Marty Taylor said on social media. “What could possibly go wrong?”

Patriotic Cowboys ‘R Us


Warfighter-obsessed Pete Kegsbreath
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Abby Zimet
Oct 02, 2026
FURTHER 

COMMON DREAMS

Sidestepping his debacle of a war, “smug pathetic little man,” warfighter fetishist and Gen.-Patton-cosplaying clown Pete Hegseth just gave a blustering speech before troops In a “hyper-macho freak show” to announce he’s cutting forces, starting several senseless new programs, and proclaiming, “We are no longer the woke (or) weak department...No fatties, trannies, beardos, weirdos, wimps, radicals. Just warriors.” Appalled consensus on the yahoo “turning the military into a frat house”: “What a dick.”

Perhaps due to his low-rent credentials as a weekend TV host at Fox - and a history of drunkenness, adultery, sexual assault and on-the-job incompetence so sordid he needed JD’s tie-breaking vote to get his job - Hegseth has built a sloppy, fragile “Department of Defensiveness” focused on shaping a narrative and persona to his liking - one based on paranoia, distrust, dysfunction, lies and frequent purges of those deemed disloyal. From his make-up studio to his press strictures to his blunders - Signalgate, the war, its first day’s war crimes - Pete’s spent an inordinate amount of time covering his ass and overcompensating for his failures. “He’s just a true believer in way over his head, the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect,” said one DOD employee. “Generally, we consider him a joke, a deeply unqualified clown.”

Still, with men reportedly fleeing MAGA, their need to “pump up that masculine animus” is well-served by Pete’s juvenile, chest-pounding, lethality-obsessed focus on testosterone in the name of a “High-T Department of War” that has “nothing to do with science and everything to do with regressive ideas of what masculinity is.” The same idiocy fuels all the culture war malevolence: Banning books, gutting DEI initiatives - “Diversity is not our strength” - blocking promotions for women and Blacks, a “no more dudes and dresses” transphobia, and ending tenure for civilian professors at military academies ‘cause who needs to protect independent thinkers, scholars, leaders, experts from “the tyranny of a government that actively hates its critics,” the “mindset of someone who has learned nothing (from) American military failures.”

And so to another cringey, Strangelovian “State of the Force Address,” which was not a thing until a TV bobblehead took over the military and turned it into bumbling amateur-hour theater. Last year, he summoned nearly 800 generals, admirals, advisors from around the world, all smarter and higher-ranking than him, to rant about beards and “fat troops,” tell them they “kill people and break things for a living,” and prattle about a 10% cut in their numbers by “removing redundant force structure to optimize and streamline leadership.” When he paused for applause, there was only deep silence. Maybe because a Joint Chiefs chairman, two service chiefs, two intelligence directors, several generals and the better part of the Army’s senior leadership “were told to run faster by a weekend television host.”

On Wednesday, he gathered about 600 officers and enlisted members, again at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, for another speech. In the weeks leading up to his latest dash of show business, The Wall Street Journal reported, he emailed commanders asking them to nominate troops to attend. They had to “fit certain physical standards,” he wrote, to have the proper height/weight ratio, with “impeccable grooming: ”I want central casting.“ If they were hot enough, he added, as a bonus some would have ”the opportunity“ to join him in a hot and sweaty dawn work-out at the Pentagon. Totally normal! And luckily, a camera crew was there to follow them on a chanting, banner-bearing run through D.C. To make them look even cooler, he gave them all t-shirts that read, ”This Is War.“ Or at least off-off Broadway.



Later, before a giant American flag, he dropped the hammer in a campy speech many compared to SNL’s Colin Jost doing Pete Hegseth, or Tom Cruise’s braying misogynist in Magnolia, or George C. Scott’s Gen. Patton “minus the inspiration.” Under his “less generals, more GIs” mandate - though it’s “fewer” not less - he said he was doubling the previous cut of 10% of high-ranking personnel to 20% with, wrote Tom Wellborn, “the confidence of a man who has looked at the most powerful armed force in the world and concluded its central weakness was the number of people in it who outrank a major,” what he was. Months into a disastrous war, “That is the force Pete Hegseth has built by subtraction. What it has lost is (what) a general is for, which is to be the person in the room who says no, and (he) has made sure, one firing at a time, there is nobody left in the room to say it.”

“The media calls that a purge,” blustered Hegseth, evidently expecting criticism. “I call it accountability. As usual, what the media levels as an accusation, I wear as an accomplishment.” He haughtily went on to “lay it out simply for the anti-American losers in our media...We are no longer the woke department, or the weak department. Simple translation? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.” On coverage of the war and eight attempted suicides on the USS Lincoln, he slammed “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, false claims of low troop morale or flat-out propaganda as if it’s written by our adversaries.” “The information space is a battle space,” he said. “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in.” Smirking, he added,.“With testosterone testing on top.” Jesus, dude.

He also announced several new programs with fancy warlike names like Fortress America and Autonomous War Command or AutoWarCom, a “four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities,” and “The Next Great American Base,” the first new military base in 40 years, with all 50 states “invited to bid for it like an Amazon headquarters,” and “America’s Corps of Cadets, creating new college partnerships with right-wing Liberty University and Hillsdale College, plus Louisiana State, Mississippi, Tuskegee Universities, to increase the number of ”patriotic leaders of character“ and counter ”anti-American, DEI-worshiping woke factories,“ aka the Ivy League schools Hegseth attended.

There’s the bonkers Project Meridian to study “the future of warfare,” headed by “three of our nation’s best minds” - two tech fat cats and one 83-year-old MAGA hawk - none of whom have served in the military, two of whom have made fortunes from it. Cue Elon Musk, a gonzo rocket salesman with billions in Pentagon contracts, GOP pol Newt Gingrich, who got almost as many deferments as Trump during the Vietnam War, and Palmer Luckey, MAGA donor, self-proclaimed “radical Zionist” and founder of tech company Anduril - “three great Americans to help plan the next war with three people who have never been in one,” what could possibly go wrong?“ From a military Reddit: ”Is this real?“, ”Yes master code-monkey, infosec ninja, and tech infrastructure guru Newt Gingrich age 83. Our enemies are so fuct bro!“ and ”Oh fuck this fucking Nazi-loving fuck outta here.“

There’s a new Office of Religious Affairs for a DOD “putting on the full armor of God” to “strengthen the moral, ethical and spiritual readiness of our warfighters,” aka “do the Lord’s work to improve smiting capacity,” because, “while we wage physical war, the real battle is spiritual.” (Maybe why the Pentagon’s covering up not-real casualties?) It’s “voluntary,” which skeptics say is akin to being “voluntold” to do things. Finally, as a party favor, troops were given a new 144-page “field manual” of transcripts of Hegseth speeches. Its forward is by Trump, in classic Trumpese. “As your Commander-in-Chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb Wars,” it reads. “I will unleash you to be violent, lethal and unstoppable - and I will always have your back. Godspeed, Great Warriors. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

 YouTubewww.youtube.com

Along with other regime Nazis, crackpots and fools, theories abound as to what the fuck is wrong with Pete Hegseth. Many argue he’s afflicted with the common sickness of countless, soulless, mediocre white men who know, deep inside, they have risen further than they deserve to. Hence, the bottomless need to be subservient to a monster like Trump (who is too mad to know that) to maintain their place and value in a white guy patriarchy, to always understand “who they get to abuse, and who they are supposed to take abuse from,” and to remain within that vaunted structure, the only one where they have power and respect, by continuing to rule over those they’ve been taught are beneath them. It’s also why, conversely, they freak out when their vital slot is threatened: See Hegseth’s frantic lie detectors at any sign of leaking, mocking, saying no.

Hegseth seems particularly despised by Americans, many of whom eagerly await his war crimes trial, his impeachment,, his rapturing - hopefully first in line, though maybe behind Goebbels/Miller. The concrete damage done by his legacy - the calamitous war, hollowing of the military’s promotion chain, lethality-tinged dumbing down of its intellectual infrastructure and exploitation of those serving - will presumably take years to repair. But people hate him just as much for his personal failings: his gross unfitness and incompetence, his swaggering “Jr High Machismo,” the Nazi-adjacent arrogance of “this nose-powdering drunk,” the lying, preening chutzpah of the military’s worst-ever leader consistently “acting like a 19-year-old edgelord loser,” like “a dipshit,” “an asshole,” “an absolute tinydick in every goddamn way.”

Several truly obnoxious moments of his state-of-the-empire speech ignited that animus. His attack on media who do their job and tell the truth about him began with a lame nod to the First Amendment - “A free press is of course important” - that veered to a diatribe: “But partisan activism that intentionally smears the troops and the historic mission they are undertaking (is) anti-American. It’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason, actually...It has to be said.” Umm, not, said America: “Secretary of Dewar’s doesn’t get he’s the only one getting smeared, not the troops,” “I love the free press until they say words I don’t like in which case I call them traitors and want them killed,” “Bro, they’re not shitting on the troops, just you,” “It’s called free speech, fucknut. The thing your troops are supposed to defend,” “The mission of our military has become historic only in the degree of its absurdity.”

Then there was a pitiful, fitness-instructor-like defense of his bullying of troops: “Telling someone to get in shape or shave or fix their uniform or start busting their ass - that’s not discrimination. That’s leadership.” Fact: Actually, it’s neither. It’s stupid, shallow, beside-the-point bullying. Many argued it’s just “being a dick” and “an asshole.” That he should “tell his boss to get in shape and start busting his ass.” That it’s weird how he “doesn’t get to the part where he actually discriminates.” That leadership is “inspiring, being an example, not getting your nation into an illegal war, losing it in days and committing war crimes.” That he’s “a drunk, vain, adulterous rapist with ridiculous sideburns.” That it’s “stunning in an awful way a man his age is so immature.” That “this motherfucker is waaay out over his skis.” And damn, more fucking patriotic cowboys is the last thing we need thanks.

How Pete's (deservedly) doingScreengrab from CNN